John Cridland, the CBI director general, wants to see the Chancellor put a bit
more “elbow grease” into his plan for growth.

“The relentless focus on infrastructure is the right one,” he says, but he’s falling short on delivery.

Mr Cridland has a point. In November 2011, the Government unveiled its new National Infrastructure Plan and signed a “memorandum of understanding” with pension funds for as much as £20bn of investment. Last October, it signed another “memorandum of understanding” with them to set up an investment platform later this year with seed capital of less than £1bn.

Forget the £20bn. Nearly 18 months after the announcement, we have two “memos”, a fraction of the financial commitment hoped, and not a penny invested in infrastructure. Crowbarring private sector money into public projects is proving painfully difficult. At this rate, the next election will have come and gone before the Government could claim a single success.

There is an alternative, though. The Government could simply borrow to invest. With the economy still in the doldrums, as the CBI made clear once again on Tuesday, the time has come for bold action. And if infrastructure investment is the Chancellor’s preferred growth engine, he has unwittingly created some room for himself.

The decision to abandon his debt reduction target in December was a liberating moment. His remaining fiscal mandate is to reduce the “current” budget deficit, which is made up of welfare and departmental spending. It excludes capital spending, such as investment in public infrastructure. Until he broke his own rules, the only thing preventing him from spending on infrastructure was the debt target.

In other words, George Osborne can borrow to invest without a further rule breach. If he issued project bonds linked to specific developments, he might even find willing buyers in those very same pension funds that have been ineffective so far. He could also console himself with the knowledge that he’d be using the UK’s record low borrowing costs to build the country’s future.

Of course, it would almost certainly mean waving goodbye to the UK’s AAA credit rating – but that must be lost anyway given the scale of the borrowing overshoot. According to the CBI, the Government is on course to borrow £75bn more than the £35bn it had originally expected next year.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and another £10bn of targeted borrowing could be just the kind of “elbow grease” needed to finally deliver some growth.

Jenkins’ plan for Barclays needs time to succeed

Promises, promises. Barclays shareholders have certainly heard a lot of them, as indeed have investors in banks more generally.

It has been an unbroken rule of the financial crisis that no sooner does a bank appoint a new chief executive than they spend the first six months of their tenure “reviewing” the business and preparing a “strategic plan”.

Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and now Barclays have all gone down this road. Indeed, you could argue that Barclays has taken it twice, given the mini-review undertaken by Bob Diamond before he replaced John Varley in 2011.

But as any good student of military history knows, no plan survives first contact with the enemy and so it has been in the banking industry.

All the banks have had to rip up parts of their plan or extend targets as the severity of the crisis has rendered ambitious targets impossible, and realistic ones a lot more difficult.

So Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins might forgive investors if they are somewhat sceptical when they see him committing the bank to a whole new series of targets in an environment that remains uncertain for major financial institutions.

Certainly, his targets are more realistic than those of some of his peers and his promise to transform the bank’s culture is to be applauded – indeed, analysts rewarded his presentation with a generous ovation.

However, it will require some pretty impressive performances by the bank’s core businesses if his targets are to be met.

For instance, to hit its 2015 earnings targets, Barclays is assuming revenue growth of about 10pc, to be generated at the same time that it is cutting costs by the same amount. If investment banking revenues remain flat over the period – and, don’t forget, they have fallen by 3pc since 2010 – then the rest of the bank’s revenues will have to grow by at least 16pc to hit that target, according to Credit Suisse analysts.

Barclays shareholders might remember that Mr Diamond came into the chief executive’s job in 2011 promising revenue growth of between £4.3bn and £6.4bn by now. Instead the bank has seen its income fall by a cumulative £2.4bn.

Mr Jenkins asks that he is judged not today (though he wouldn’t have complained about the market’s enthusiastic response), but in five years’ time. Time is not always a luxury given to chief executives; but Mr Jenkins needs it if his vow to transform the culture at Barclays is one promise that is kept.

Reckitt’s on a roll in Latin America

The appeal of the Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro compared with Slough trading estates is obvious. But the reason that Reckitt Benckiser is doing deals in Brazil rather than nearer its head office in Slough is not the warmer climate. Rather, it is because Rakesh Kapoor, Reckitt’s chief, believes Latin America and other emerging markets are the future.

The company’s $482m (£308m) deal with US drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb to sell over-the-counter drugs in Latin America clearly demonstrates the evolution of Reckitt. As the balance of economic power in the world changes, Reckitt is evolving from a seller of Dettol cleaning products to homes in Slough, to a seller of the cough and cold drug Naldecon to the people of Rio. Reckitt will release annual results on Wednesday and – with revenues and profits forecast to rise – they are likely to show the strategy is working.